December 2011

In 1980, Abraham Karem, an engineer who had emigrated from Israel, retreated into his three-car garage in Hacienda Heights outside Los Angeles and, to the bemusement of his tolerant wife, began to build an aircraft.

As more users store sensitive data on smartphones, mobile devices could become a target for hackers, prompting technology companies and the U.S. government to rethink the way users log onto their devices.

The Saint John Police Force's computer scientist James Stewart has developed software that ranks every criminal violation based on severity, taking into account how long it has been since the crime took place.

China has begun operating a homegrown satellite navigation service that is designed to provide an alternative to the U.S. Global Positioning System and, according to defense experts, could help the Chinese military to identify…

Imagine this nightmarish possibility: al-Qaida terrorists remotely disabling the brakes on thousands of cars racing down a Bay Area freeway during the morning commute, leading to massive chaos, death, and destruction.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston have developed a mathematical network to predict drug side effects that normally are not discovered until thousands of people have taken the medication.

U.S. Naval Academy researchers have developed a method for analyzing email traffic in real time to identify spam messages as they come across the wire, using the information from the TCP packets that carry the messages.

At the beginning of this year I wrote that the transition to universal mobile digital money is likely to be among the most exciting, important and challenging projects the world will undertake in the coming decades. Everything…

The last time we wrote about Bitcoin, in October, the currency's future looked grim. A series of security incidents had created an avalanche of bad press, which in turn undermined public confidence in the currency.

A major goal for information security students and institutions should be developing a cultural way of learning, instead of simply studying for tests and doing projects, says Purdue University professor Eugene Spafford.

The brainiacs at IBM made some pretty far-out predictions this week: In five years, they say, you won't need passwords, there will be no more digital divide, and mind reading will no longer be science fiction.

Al-Shabaab, the Somali militant group heretofore best known for stoning teenage girls, blowing up soccer fans, and blocking food aid to their starving countrymen, is now on Twitter. You can talk to them if you like.

Google announced it is ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive…

Self-repairing electronic chips are one step closer, according to a team of U.S. researchers, creating a circuit that heals itself when cracked thanks to the release of liquid metal that restores conductivity.

China became the world's top patent filer in 2011, surpassing the U.S. and Japan as it steps up innovation to improve its intellectual property rights track record, a Thomson Reuters research report showed last Wednesday.